Coping strategies - modern solutions for increasing the efficiency of highly professionalized human resources

The purpose of this study is to analyze the importance of coping strategies on the perception of occupational stress and staff satisfaction with the organization within a stressful environment like that of a military-type of organization. In the theoretical part of this study we have addressed the following issues: organizational usefulness of personal coping strategies in human resource streamlining process, the role of individual characteristics in coping development and the manner of designing / strategic use of the coping. The main objectives of this research are: 1) analyze the perception on occupational stress in the military employees depending in their coping skills development and 2) assess the impact of coping upon staff satisfaction with the organization. For this study we have used 60 subjects (executives in the same department) and organized them into two groups of 30 subjects each. For the first group we have held for one whole week daily training and coaching sessions on coping strategy design and application. Two weeks after the last training session, subjects of both groups were assessed by means of the occupational stress indicator, which has been adapted to the purpose and the environment covered by this research, with observations collected and analyzed in terms of frequency and correlation for each group. The comparative analysis of the observations obtained from the two study groups (trained and untrained) has revealed that the use of coping strategies will lower the intensity of personal and occupational stress while increasing satisfaction with the organization, leading to increased ability of the staff to concentrate and act. The study of coping skills in an occupational environment characterized by diversity of activities, extremely high expectations and the large size of the organization enables the formulation of conclusions regarding the influence of personal coping strategies on demanding and highly professionalized organizational environmentsoccupational stress, coping strategy, organizational crisis situation, human resources, professional efficiency

Theory of deferred action: Agent-based simulation model for designing complex adaptive systems

Deferred action is the axiom that agents act in emergent organisation to achieve predetermined goals. Enabling deferred action in designed artificial complex adaptive systems like business organisations and IS is problematical. Emergence is an intractable problem for designers because it cannot be predicted. We develop proof-of-concept, conceptual proto-agent model, of emergent organisation and emergent IS to understand better design principles to enable deferred action as a mechanism for coping with emergence in artefacts. We focus on understanding the effect of emergence when designing artificial complex adaptive systems by developing an exploratory proto-agent model and evaluate its suitability for implementation as agent-based simulation

In search of self : the hospitalisation experiences of children with cancer : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University

Cancer is the second most common cause of death in children in the Western world. The diagnosis and treatment process is painful and distressing, and is carried out in the hospital environment. This environment is foreign to most children, and influences children's coping with the experience of having cancer. Research in this area has focussed on assessing coping responses, and designing interventions for the pain, distress and anxiety associated with the medical procedures. There have also been studies which have measured the prevalence of emotional and behavioural difficulties in children with cancer. No studies have been conducted into children's experiences of hospital expressed in their own terms. The aim of the present study was to elicit the hospital experiences of children with cancer. Interviews were conducted with seven children, aged 5 - 15 years, who had completed treatment for cancer within the previous two years. An interpretive phenomenological design was utilised in order to gain and analyse accounts of the participants' perceptions and experiences. Findings suggest that the experiences can be interpreted in terms of two themes underlying the experiences of children with cancer, and their coping responses. The first theme is 'Retaining a sense of self-as-normal', which describes efforts to 'Maintain links with familiar people' and 'Becoming 'at home' in hospital'. The second theme is 'Incorporating multiple selves', which are 'Self-as-body-in-pain', 'Self-as-confined', 'Self-as-patient' and 'Self-as-survivor-living-with-cancer'. Success in retaining a sense of self-as-normal both affects, and is influenced by, the incorporation of multiple selves. Implications of these themes for practice in terms of the assessment of coping responses, design of interventions, and the measurement of outcomes, are suggested

Towards Designing a Mobile Stress Coping Assistant

Stress is a major public health concern and a severe threat to everyone. Facilitated by their powerful sensing capabilities, mobile devices may assist individuals in coping with stress. Building on existing studies and mobile apps supporting stress coping, we propose the design of a mobile coping assistant that uses multimodal sensor data to reduce its user’s stress. Based on sensor data, a mobile coping assistant (1) warns the user about elevated stress, (2) delivers a fundamental understanding of why they are currently stressed, (3) recommends targeted coping strategies to encourage and train effective coping behavior, and (4) executes automated actions to reduce stress exposure. The presented design comprises an architecture, good practices for designing the architectural components, and an algorithm for selecting adequate coping actions and recommendations. A prototypical instantiation indicates opportunities and challenges. Future research should evaluate the short- and long-term effectiveness of mobile coping assistants in the field

Curbing the Costs of Everyday Living

This publication explains the value of controlling small expenses and provides suggestions for designing a system to manage money wisely. It also offers coping strategies and a variety of techniques and practices for money management

Exploiting rules and processes for increasing flexibility in service composition

Recent trends in the use of service oriented architecture for designing, developing, managing, and using distributed applications have resulted in an increasing number of independently developed and physically distributed services. These services can be discovered, selected and composed to develop new applications and to meet emerging user requirements. Service composition is generally defined on the basis of business processes in which the underlying composition logic is guided by specifying control and data flows through Web service interfaces. User demands as well as the services themselves may change over time, which leads to replacing or adjusting the composition logic of previously defined processes. Coping with change is still one of the fundamental problems in current process based composition approaches. In this paper, we exploit declarative and imperative design styles to achieve better flexibility in service composition

The impacts of climate variability on welfare in rural Mexico

This paper examines the impacts of weather shocks, defined as rainfall or growing degree days more than a standard deviation from their respective long-run means, on household consumption per capita and child height-for-age. The results reveal that the current risk-coping mechanisms are not effective in protecting these two dimensions of welfare from erratic weather patterns. These findings imply that the change in the patterns of climatic variability associated with climate change is likely to reduce the effectiveness of the current coping mechanisms even more and thus increase household vulnerability further. The results reveal that weather shocks have substantial (negative as well as positive) effects on welfare that vary across regions (North vs. Center and South) and socio-economic characteristics (education and gender). The heterogeneous impacts of climatic variability suggest that a"tailored"approach to designing programs aimed at decreasing the sensitivity and increasing the capacity of rural households to adapt to climate change in Mexico is likely to be more effective.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Science of Climate Change,Regional Economic Development,Global Environment Facility,Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases

ClockViz: Designing Public Visualization for Coping with Collective Stress in Teamwork

The intervention solutions for coping with collective stress have been neglected in interaction design because of limited scalability of the physiological measuring methods. This paper focuses on exploring visual biofeedback design for collective stress in the context of teamwork. We design ClockViz, an augmented reality installation overlaid with static or dynamic projection to visualize three different extents of collective stress on a clock. Results of a 16-participant study show that ClockViz is useful to provide biofeedback data, change their internal status, and increase their mindfulness. Based on the results, we also discussed the potential solutions to collective stress sensing for designers to apply into their interactive design intervention